Interest in Create a Photo Book Swap?

[kaiyen]

Ray,
How were you thinking of assembling the documents into a book? Literally a book that we have printed? Or just a virtual book?

allan

 

[jan normandale]

tell me / show me how to put a "book together" and I'm in. Cheers, Jan

 

[kaiyen]

Jan,
The idea is that you can present a certain number of photos - 5-7 - in whatever format and layout you want. You can do this just in MS Word if you wanted. Then send it over to Adobe to turn into a PDF and then...we'll do something with those PDFs. Word has sufficient layout features that it's not that hard. Just drag some images around, put in some text boxes, and you're there.

allan

 

[RayPA]

Ray,
How were you thinking of assembling the documents into a book? Literally a book that we have printed? Or just a virtual book?

allan

I was thinking each participant/photographer would create their own complete virtual book of images to pass around.


🙂

 

[GeneW]

I'd love to participate in this. Sounds like a good exercise and good fun.

BTW, the easiest way I know to create really nice PDF is to use OpenOffice Writer, the 'Word' component of OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/

It's free and there are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The PDF output is really excellent. I used this product to create PDFs in a technical writing course I took and was very impressed.

If you know Word, you're ready to use OO Writer. When finished with your bookette, 'Export as PDF' and Bob's your Uncle.

Gene

 

[Gid]

Well, I took Gene's advice and downloaded Open Office. Created the attached PDF in about 10 minutes (using the export to PDF option) - great image layout options. Ignore the blurb, just an example. BTW you don't have to resize your images, but it helps if they're not too big to start with.

Regards

Gid

 

[GeneW]

Gid, that looks GOOD!

Gene

 

[Gid]

Gene,

Thanks. This is just scratching the surface. There are lots of layout options. I am just amazed that this stuff is free.

Gid

 

[JoeFriday]

since you guys got me going, I just spent a little quality time (ok, about 10 minutes) and threw this together based on a few low-rez photos I had on my work computer.. it was done in QuarkXPress.. not exactly what I'd tell people to buy just for making PDFs, but it makes the job very easy (once you know how the program works)

 

[GeneW]

Brett, that's very funny! Yes, I'm sure Quark does a magnificent job, but I'll stick with free 😀

Gene

 

[JoeFriday]

oh come on, Gene.. whats $700 to this crowd? 😉

 

[Gid]

Brett,

Cool, but I'm with Gene on the free stuff. Don't mean to offend, but that bride looked a bit stoney faced 😀

Gid

 

[RayPA]

Wow! I was going to break out InDesign, FrameMaker, or Acrobat Pro, but these online create-a-pdf options are so easy it's very tempting, to go this route. The files aren't that big either! Maybe we could do this entirely through a thread (?). Any feelings on that? Would you prefer to set this up as a swap, or 'open' through a thread? My initial thought was as a swap, but an open submission to a thread could be cool, too.



.

 

[Goodyear]

Sounds fun.

There are a number of PDF "printer drivers" (for Windows, I know nothing of the Mac) out there that will let you output a PDF from whatever software you normally use.

I use a decent free one, but Id need to go hunting for the name of it.

 

[JoeFriday]

not a bad idea.. but ideally, you should set up a thread for posting the PDFs only.. no comments allowed there so the PDFs don't get buried, as always happens

 

[jan normandale]

Jan,
The idea is that you can present a certain number of photos - 5-7 - in whatever format and layout you want. You can do this just in MS Word if you wanted. Then send it over to Adobe to turn into a PDF and then...we'll do something with those PDFs. Word has sufficient layout features that it's not that hard. Just drag some images around, put in some text boxes, and you're there.

allan

Kaiyen.... doh! Of course. I was looking for something to create in PDF from the get go and I don't have Adobe for creating only reading.... but I own a Mac and I can save docs as PDF's so I'm good. I can use Word for Mac and then save as a PDF... Yay!

Definitely in!

 

[Gid]

not a bad idea.. but ideally, you should set up a thread for posting the PDFs only.. no comments allowed there so the PDFs don't get buried, as always happens

Good idea.

So, whats the format, content etc to be? Just a collection of our images and words? RF only? Page limits - could create a book each! I guess there must be an upload limit and even if there isn't we don't want to kill the site!

Comments, suggestions?

Gid

 

[RayPA]

Good idea.

So, whats the format, content etc to be? Just a collection of our images and words? RF only? Page limits - could create a book each! I guess there must be an upload limit and even if there isn't we don't want to kill the site!

Comments, suggestions?

Gid

The initial concept was that each of us was to create a photo book each, so the emphasis should be on highlighting and presenting your images as you'd like to see them. No restrictions on content, no predefinded theme (as the photogrpher you can do whatever you want, thematically), 5-7 images, be as creative, or fancy, or as simple as you'd like.

Can we all agree that the only restriction should be RF camera images?

Maybe we'll all upload to a thread as Brett suggested, so that people can get ideas from what others are doing (?).

🙂



.

 

[Goodyear]

FWIW, I'd quite like the swap idea as opposed to just posting to the site. Or an offshoot site to archive them? (That sounds afun, actually...)

 

[Iyidin_Kyeimo]

There's a print driver program called cutePDF that I use.


install it, make your document in word, print it out as normal, but select cutePDF from the drop down menu instead of your normal printer.

Very easy to use...